During a lull in the long siege in the council-chambers at Paris, Lawrence had one more adventure. He had left his diaries and nearly all of his important papers relating to the campaign in a vault in Cairo, because the Mediterranean was still infested with German U-boats when the Turkish armistice was signed and when he returned from the Near East. So after the preliminary work of the peace conference had been completed, Lawrence found himself in need of his notes and papers.
He heard that ten British machines—giant Handley-Page planes, with Rolls-Royce engines, that had seen service in many a night raid over Germany—were leaving for Egypt to blaze a new air-route from London to Cairo. Lawrence promptly arranged to accompany them. But the machines were old and nearly worn out, and the pilots were daredevil chaps who literally ran their planes to pieces. In fact, some of the pilots had never flown a Handley-Page, and some of their mechanics had never even worked on a Rolls-Royce engine. On the way from Cologne to Lyons five forced landings were made. Nearly all the planes had to be rebuilt several times during the journey to Egypt.
The Air Ministry in London had vaguely directed the squadron to an aërodrome at Rome. When the pilots reached the Eternal City, they flew back and forth across the Tiber, over St. Peter’s, the Colosseum, the Forum, and up and down the Appian Way, but nowhere on any of the Seven Hills could they spot a landing-ground. Finally the pilot of Lawrence’s plane saw what he thought might be an aërodrome. But when he swooped down it turned out to be a stone-quarry. Just before reaching the quarry he saw his mistake, switched on the engine, and tried to ascend again. Unluckily he was unable to get up sufficient flying speed. The machine raced along the ground, then bolted over the edge of the quarry, and crashed down into a tree-top.
Lawrence was seated in the gun-pit. The occupants had a vague impression of a tree coming toward them at amazing speed. Suddenly there was a noise like the crack of a machine-gun. In the flash of a second the great plane toppled over on its nose and right wing and splintered into match-wood. Both pilots were killed outright. The two mechanics, who were seated with Lawrence in the rear in the machine-gunner’s compartment, were pitched out on their heads. One suffered concussion of the brain; the other was merely stunned. As soon as the second recovered consciousness he began to dig Lawrence out of the débris. The colonel’s shoulder-blade, collar-bone, and three ribs were broken. In the excavating process, which took ten minutes, the mechanic kept sputtering excitedly that the plane might catch fire any minute. Lawrence replied, “Well, if she does, when I arrive in the other world I may find it chilly.”
In spite of the accident, however, Lawrence jumped into another plane a few days later and continued his flight to Egypt. “Our strangest sensation,” he afterward told me in Paris, “was breakfasting on the isle of Crete and dining the same day in Cairo, seven hundred miles away.” After he had gathered up his papers, and still somewhat shaken up as a result of his aërial interlude, he returned to the seats of the mighty in Paris.
At the conclusion of the peace conference, Emir Feisal and staff visited London and then made a tour of the British Isles. Colonel Lawrence took delight in showing his Arab friends around. Everything was new to several of the sheiks who had just arrived from Arabia, and one would have expected them to be tremendously impressed by the subways, the automobiles, and the thousand and one wonders of the capital of the British Empire. But these things merely excited a supercilious, sheik-like smile. They were too proud ever to show any signs of surprise, except on one occasion in their room at the Ritz. They were dumfounded when they turned on the water-faucets and found that one ran hot and the other cold. In the holy Koran, they said, they had been told of the fountains of paradise, which flow with milk or with honey at will; but they had never heard of earthly fountains such as these in the Ritz. After alternating them a bit and making quite sure that they themselves were not dreaming, they told Lawrence they wanted to take some of those magic faucets back to Arabia so that they could carry them in their camel-bags to supply them with hot and cold water while trekking across the desert!
On one occasion Emir Feisal visited Glasgow and was entertained at a great civic banquet. He had been so busy seeing the sights along the Clyde that when it came time to respond to the toast in his honor he was unprepared. The only other person present who could understand Arabic was Colonel Lawrence, who sat beside him to act as his interpreter; and Emir Feisal leaned over and whispered in his ear: “I haven’t a thing to say, so I am going to repeat the passage from the Koran on the cow. When you get up to interpret you can tell them anything you like!” It happens that the passage on the cow is one of the most sonorous and euphonious parts of the Koran, and the business men of Glasgow were tremendously impressed by the marvelous flow of eloquence that rolled like Niagara from the lips of the Oriental monarch, never dreaming that he was simply reeling off the Prophet Mohammed’s dissertation on the cow.
Shortly before he returned to the Near East the emir was entertained at a banquet in London, and Lord Balfour during the course of a conversation tried to find out what Emir Feisal thought of the British Government. He succeeded. “It reminds me of a caravan in the desert,” replied the George Washington of Arabia. “If you see a caravan from afar off, when you are approaching it from the rear, it looks like one camel. But, riding on, you see that camel tied to the tail of the next, and that one to the tail of the next, and so on until you come to the head of the caravan, where you find a little donkey leading the whole string of camels.” Lord Balfour wondered to just whom the emir was referring!
When Feisal returned to Syria the people again welcomed him as their liberator, and after a few weeks they proclaimed him King of Syria, with Damascus as his capital. But this new state was short-lived, for without foreign coöperation to help him finance his government his position soon became impossible. After using up his own private fortune in a vain attempt to develop order out of chaos, he was obliged to leave Damascus, and the French at once arbitrarily occupied the whole of Syria. For the moment it seemed as though Feisal’s hopes were shattered. But Lawrence and the other British leaders who had been associated with the Arabian Revolution still had another card to play.
All through these turbulent days Emir Feisal’s father had continued to strengthen his position in the Hedjaz. Galloping out of Mecca in the gorgeous Arabian twilight, a slight, lean figure was often seen by the Bedouins of the desert; it was Hussein, their King, on a night journey to Jeddah, forty miles away. No music precedes him, nor stately pageantry; he rides alone and a-muleback.